1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of processing and transforming structured documents, such as extensible markup language (XML), standardized generalized markup language (SGML), hypertext markup language (HTML), and unstructured data and documents in databases and/or filesystems.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computers and computer storage have become ubiquitous, the volume of information that various organizations maintain has increased dramatically. The information is often stored in many different forms, such as word processor documents, spreadsheet files, databases, portable document format (pdf) documents, imaged documents (e.g. scanned-in to various graphical display formats), plain text, etc. Additionally, documents may be stored in markup language form such as SGML, HTML, XML, etc.
Having information in so many different forms complicates the sharing of information within the organization as well as external to the organization. Recently, XML has been emerging as a standard for describing content in documents and providing structure to unstructured data and/or documents. XML provides a flexible, extensible mechanism for defining markup for the document, permitting the markup to be customized to the information being described.
One mechanism implemented as a means to process XML is the extensible stylesheet language (XSL) and stylesheets written using XSL. Stylesheets may be written to transform XML documents from one markup definition (or “vocabulary”) defined within XML to another vocabulary, from XML markup to another structured or unstructured document form (such as plain text, word processor, spreadsheet, database, pdf, HTML, etc.), or from another structured or unstructured document form to XML markup. Thus, stylesheets may be used to simplify the access to an organization's information (in its many different forms) by transforming the document's structure from its stored form to the form expected by a given user. There are also other types of stylesheets (e.g. cascading style sheets, or CSS, defined as an extension to HTML).
Typically, the document transformation process is performed in software executing on a general purpose computer (e.g. the server that manages the document storage, the user machine, etc.). Significant delays in accessing such documents are being experienced.